Code Unknown

by JASON SOLOMONS, Mail on Sunday

Michael Haneke's Code Unknown is original, brave and powerful.

The director - whose latest film, The Piano Teacher, was the most successful at Cannes, winning the Grand Prix and awards for Isabelle Huppert and Benoit Magimel - examines one tiny incident and its far-reaching consequences with unnerving detachment.

While Juliette Binoche stars as an actress making a film as a truant nephew shows up, the film is really a mosaic of scenes, life's little dramas and ironies which we're shown then brusquely denied.

Some scenes are in absolute silence, some feature deaf mutes playing the drums; one has a tractor simply ploughing across the screen, another shows Binoche in a vest, doing the ironing and watching the news.

The cumulative effect is a hypnotic, often agonising, study of chance, timing and fate.